BRUSSELS — The Italian election victory of far-right leader and Eurosceptic Giorgia Meloni, who once wanted to ditch the euro, rattled the European establishment on Monday worried about a new rightward shift in Europe.
European Union leaders now view the comfortable victory of its coalition in Italy, one of its founding members, with caution and some trepidation, despite assurances from Ms Meloni, who would be the first far-right nationalist to governing Italy since Mussolini, that she moderated her point of view.
But it is difficult for them to escape a degree of dread. Even given the bloc’s successes in recent years in agreeing on a groundbreaking pandemic stimulus fund and in dealing with Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the appeal of nationalists and populists remains strong – and spreading, a potential threat to European ideals and cohesion.
Earlier this month Sweden’s far-right Democrats became the country’s second-largest party and the largest in what is expected to be a right-wing coalition.
The economic impact of Covid and now war in Ukraine, with high public debt and runaway inflation, has deeply damaged centrist parties across Europe. Far-right parties have not only pushed centrist parties to the right, but have also become “normalized”, not ostracized, said Charles A. Kupchan, EU expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“The direction of the political momentum is changing – we had a wave of centrism before and during the pandemic, but now it feels like the political table is tilting towards right-wing populists,” he said. declared. “And that’s a big deal.”
Under incumbent technocratic Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Italy has played an important role in a weak leadership Europe, both on vital economic issues and on the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But Italy has now turned away from the European mainstream.
An Italy led by Ms Meloni risks being constrained by European scrutiny over billions of euros in crucial funding. In the best-case scenario, say diplomats and analysts, this will not break the European consensus, but could seriously complicate policy-making.
If Ms Meloni and her coalition partners choose to side with other populist and Eurosceptic leaders within the European Union, such as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, she can certainly “spoiling the job,” Mr. Kupchan said. said.
For Italy, teaming up with “Orban and company is Brussels’ nightmare,” said Stefano Stefanini, an analyst and former Italian diplomat. “For more than 10 years the EU has lived with the fear of being overwhelmed by a wave of Eurosceptic populism,” he said. “Hungary is a pain, but Italy allying with Hungary and Poland would be a serious challenge to the mainstream EU and mobilize the far right in other countries.”
The first European congratulations to him came on Sunday evening from Hungary. Mr. Orban’s political director, Balazs Orban, said in a Twitter message“In these difficult times, we need friends more than ever who share a common vision and approach to Europe’s challenges.”
Europe’s concerns are less about policy towards Ukraine. Ms Meloni said she was supportive of NATO and Ukraine and didn’t have much heat for Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, as demonstrated by her junior coalition partners Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi.
Yet Mr Berlusconi said last week that Mr Putin “was pushed by the Russian people, by his party, by his ministers to invent this special operation”. The plan, he said, was for Russian troops to come in “within a week to replace Zelensky’s government with a government of decent people.”
Italian popular opinion has traditionally been sympathetic to Moscow, with around a third of seats in the new parliament going to parties with an ambiguous stance on Russia, sanctions and military aid to Ukraine. As the war progresses, with all its domestic economic costs, Ms. Meloni may take a less firm position than Mr. Draghi.
Mr Kupchan expects “the balance of power in Europe to lean more towards diplomacy and a little less towards continuing the fight”. It is a view more popular with the populist right than with mainstream parties, but it also has prominent supporters in Germany and France.
“These elections are another sign that all is not well with the traditional parties,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and announce a complicated period for the European Union.
Even the victory a year ago of Olaf Scholz in Germany, a man of the center left, was ensured by the collapse of the centre-right Christian Democrats, who suffered their worst performance in their history, while in April, France’s long-dominant centre-right Republicans fell to less than 5% of the vote.
“People in Brussels are extremely worried about Meloni becoming EU prime minister,” Leonard said. “They’ve seen how disruptive Orban can be to a small country with no systemic role in the EU Meloni says she won’t immediately overturn the consensus on Ukraine, but could be a force for some form far more virulent Euroscepticism at council meetings.”
One or two spoilers can do a lot of damage to EU decision-making, he said, “but if it’s five or six” it becomes very difficult to achieve consistency or consensus.
When the left-wing populist five-star movement ruled Italy from 2018 to early 2021, before Mr Draghi, it created major fights in Brussels over immigration and asylum issues. Ms Meloni is expected to focus on topics such as immigration, identity issues (she despises what she calls ‘woke ideology’) and future EU rules covering debt and fiscal discipline, to replace the outdated Growth and Stability Pact.
But analysts believe she will choose her fights carefully, given Italy’s mountain of debt – more than 150% of gross domestic product – and the large sums Brussels has pledged to Rome as part of the Covid stimulus fund. . For this year, the amount is 19 billion euros, or about 18.4 billion dollars, or almost 1% of Italy’s GDP, said Mujtaba Rahman, Europe director of the Eurasia group, with a total for the next few years by about 10.5% of GDP.
“Draghi has already implemented tough reforms to please Brussels, so there is no reason for her to come and mess up and agitate the market,” Rahman said. But looking ahead, there are fears it could push for an expansionary budget, looser fiscal rules and thus make the more frugal countries in northern Europe less willing to compromise.
For Mr. Rahman, the biggest risk for Europe is Italy’s loss of influence under Mr. Draghi. He and French President Emmanuel Macron were “beginning to create an alternative axis to compete with the current leadership vacuum in Germany, and all of that will be lost,” Rahman said. Italy will go from being a country that leads to a country that Europe watches with anxiety, he said.
There was a sign of this anxiety just before the election, when Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, warned that Brussels had “the tools” to deal with Italy if things went in a “direction hard”. It was seen as a hint that the European Commission could cut funds to Italy if it was seen as violating the bloc’s democratic standards.
Mr. Salvini, seeing an opportunity, immediately replied, “What is a threat? It is shameful arrogance”, and asked Ms von der Leyen to “respect the free, democratic and sovereign vote of the Italian people” and to resist “institutional intimidation”.
Instead, Mr Stefanini, the former diplomat, urged Brussels to be patient and engage with Ms Meloni. “The new government should be judged on facts, on what it does while in power,” he said. “The real risk is that, through exaggerated overreactions, the EU turns its legitimate concerns into self-fulfilling prophecies.
“If she feels rejected, she will be pushed into a corner – where she will find Orban and other kindred spirits waiting for her, and she will team up with them,” he continued. “But if she is welcomed as a legitimate, democratically elected leader, it will be possible for the EU to do business with her.”
Luuk van Middelaar, a historian of the bloc, also urges caution. European leaders know two things about Italian prime ministers, he said. First, “they’re not very potent at home, and second, they tend not to last very long” – since World War II, an average of about 18 months.
“So they will wait and see and not be blown away,” Mr van Middelaar said. If it lasts longer, however, it could energize other far-right Eurosceptics in other big countries like France, he said, “and that would make a real difference”.